Cloud adoption still on the rise as IT departments take the lead

It’s no surprise that more and more organisations are using the cloud, but the latest State of the Cloud report from RightScale throws up some interesting trends.

The company surveyed 930 technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organisations about their adoption of cloud computing.

Among the findings are that a vast majority, 93 per cent, of organisations surveyed are running applications in the cloud or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service. In addition 82 per cent of enterprises now have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74 per cent in 2014.

It seems to be IT departments that are driving the move with 62 per cent of enterprises reporting that central IT makes the majority of their cloud spending decisions. 43 per cent of IT teams are offering some form of self-service portal to allow access to cloud services, with an additional 41 per cent planning or already developing a portal.

Public cloud is the most popular with 88 per cent of enterprises using it compared to 63 per cent with private clouds. However, the private cloud leads in workloads with only 13 per cent of enterprises running more than 1000 virtual machines in public cloud, while 22 per cent of organisations run more than 1000 VMs in private cloud.

Amazon Web Services is the most popular public service, AWS adoption is 57 per cent in this years' survey, while Azure IaaS is second on 12 per cent, up from 6 per cent in 2014.

Among enterprise respondents, Azure IaaS has narrowed the gap with 19 per cent adoption compared to AWS with 50 per cent. The rebranded vCloud Air from Vmware comes in with seven per cent adoption among enterprises, behind AWS, Azure, Rackspace, and Google.

Despite this widespread adoption there's still room for more with 68 per cent of enterprises saying they run less than a fifth of their application portfolio in the cloud.

55 per cent report that a significant portion of their existing application portfolio, although not in cloud, is built with cloud-friendly architectures.